A Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in California refused service to a white man after he repeatedly insulted and slurred a Muslim woman wearing niqab. Most of the encounter was caught on video.
The footage cuts in with the man sarcastically asking the woman, “I said, ‘Is this Halloween or something?'” The woman replies, “Why did you say that?” The man grimaces and says, “Why would I–why wouldn’t I?” The woman repeats, “Why would you say that?…What’s wrong with me?”
After quite a bit of hemming and hawing, the man eventually makes his comments clear. After the girl asks if he knows she’s a Muslim, the man sneers and says:
I don’t like it. How’s that? I don’t like that because I don’t like your religion. It says to kill me and I don’t want to be killed by you. How’s that?
The woman then engages the man in a theological inquiry, asking, “Have you read the Quran?” The man says that he has. When pressed, he says he’s “read enough of it to know.”
After ascertaining that her verbal sparring partner self-identifies as Christian, the woman then attempts to cite incidents of controversial violence in the Bible. The man isn’t interested and waves her off, calling her an “idiot” before attempting to order.
Emphasis on “attempting,” though. As the man tries to order, he’s mostly ignored by staff as the woman accuses him of committing hate speech. Then he’s shouted down by another patron off in the distance. The off-camera man yells, “Get out of here! Get out of here! You fucking racist. Get the fuck out of here.”
The Islamophobic man half-heartedly attempts to engage with the quickly-increasing group of detractors, briefly arguing with the cashier–asking for her manager–before rushing off in a huff once he realizes he’s actually talking to the supervisor on duty.
As the video ends, the Muslim woman asks the same Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf employee why the man wasn’t served. She says, “Because he is disrupting a public place and being very racist.”
[image via screengrab]
Follow Colin Kalmbacher on Twitter: @colinkalmbacher
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